Why do need to sprinkle sensors all over the planet except to pave the way for the new world order/Orwellian future? Are we developing the technology to enslave ourselves?
First we loose our privacy thru online databases (i.e. Big Data), now it's 24/7 monitoring in the physical world too.
Someone needs to slow this train down and think about the negative consequences.

There are two fundamental elements to this infrastructure - the base station end (the network) and the terminal end of the link. A Cisco (or similar) could be the type of company that could get behind the development of the network technology. The 'distant no-name factories' could develop a hugely diverse range of devices that could connect to these networks in the same way that multiple applications developers churn out apps for Smart Phones. To take just one example of an M2M application - Smart Meters: There are over 400 companies in 35 countries actively working on the development of Smart Meters for over 1.4 billion connections worldwide already.
Once a driver (say a Smart Meter or Smart Grid network) is in place, application developers will appear to exploit it. And with each base station in a Weightless network capable of supporting 100k+ connections the number is limited by our imagination. Today's iOS and Android apps demonstrate that our capability to imagine the future is initially blinkered.

The Weightless Standard defines in explicit detail how this can be done using TV white space spectrum and a completely new protocol to deliver a low cost network (fraction of traditional cellular), low cost hardware at the terminal end (around $2), low power (a ten year battery life from a primary cell) and exceptional signal propagation characteristics deriving a range of 10km and excellent building penetration.
The availability of a very large amount of bandwidth in the very high quality, low frequency, globally harmonised and license free TV white space spectrum is the catalyst for this transformational change. Dynamic Spectrum Access, deployed geo-locational database resources for TVWS, carefully considered regulation, spread spectrum transmission, cloud based network architectures, lightweight terminal processing requirements and a protocol designed from the ground up to support the specific needs of machine communications are the building blocks.
Sounds like an unobtainable utopian Shangri-La doesn't it. Until you consider that the FCC has already legislated for it, silicon is available to support it, the Standard is due to be ratified in two weeks and globally over 600 Members of the Weightless SIG are already engaged.
Happy to debate either here or on the Weightless LinkedIn Group.

Forecasting is a difficult art to pull off with credibility but there is little doubt that whether the M2M opportunity can add $1 trillion or $75 trillion to the economy it is inevitably going to be transformational. So instead of fixating on the numbers let's look at what the industry needs to do to realise the potential.
It needs a technology that is different to the legacy network infrastructures that exist today and one that is commercially and technically feasible. I'm going to argue that Weightless technology and the Weightless Standard are the keys to unlocking this potential. And I'll try to do that without writing a white paper into a comment field - there are resources on weightless.org to flesh out the arguments.
It needs a ubiquitous network infrastructure that offers price points per connection equivalent to PAN technologies such as Bluetooth, Zigbee & Wi-Fi but with the range of traditional 2G/3G/LTE technologies. And it needs to have been optimised from day 1 to address the specific needs of M2M that are fundamentally different to those for human communications...

The USD$14 trillion (who knows if that's realistic or not - I've seen forecasts of between USD$1.2 to USD$75 trillion) number cannot be measured in terms of the ASP of terminal devices. Indeed, the mean cost of terminal devices would need to be in the USD$2 to enable this market opportunity. The value is a measurement of what is enabled by a universal M2M/IoT infrastructure. And in those terms there is no reason to regard this kind of vision as unrealistic. But I'm not a social scientist so I can't comment on how to derive that kind of forecast. I can however describe precisely how low cost network infrastructure and terminal devices with an ASP of less than USD$2 can be realised using Weightless M2M technology.

Always being wary around April 1st I double checked the veracity of this $14.4 x 10E12 claim. Numerous other news source also reported Mr. Lloyd's remarks - I thought perhaps he meant Billion with a B as in 10E9 - nope - seven other news outlets say trillion as well and surprisingly, none challenged it. So either this is "the mother of universally coordinated April Fools spoofs" or a new pinnacle of "irrational exuberance". Don't get me wrong, I think IoT will be a very important technology but fourteen trillion+ in a little over 6.75 years? Compared to that the market growth of the iPhone looks like a flat-line dud!

I wonder how security will be provided for so-called "connect everything" IOT network. Nearly 20 years ago (long time, isn't it?). IPv6 designers included IPsec as standard feature for security, but IPsec is notoriously unpopular due to huge implementation diversity (=incompatibility) and difficult configuration.
Will "40Kbyte footprint" IPv6 stack support IPsec and IKEv2, or TLS1.0(likely, because SSL/TLS is selected for 6LowPAN architecture), or nothing at all?

The only REALLY likely market to come out of all this is all those electricity, water and gas meters needing to be read automatically at low cost, if only because public utilities generally have easy access to the capital needed to fund large projects. (The electricity meter's needs are somewhat unique because it tends to merge somewhat with general power distribution management or the "smart grid".) However because the data rates needed AT EACH METER are quite low it's unclear how such a network could be done efficiently. Some have envisioned an all-wireless "self-organizing" system (with individual nodes acting as data concentrators) and that no doubt could be made to work, but why would each utility need to fund its OWN network? It's also not clear why smothering individual OSes with a "universal API" helps reduce costs,
if the need could be demonstrated then this industry needs more of its own "Android-like" platform to build on, but it's not clear that the demand exists for even that. Maybe it would make more sense to "build out" these networks based on existing utilities, maybe it would make more sense to envision other models, for example you might consider something that would look more like the old "pager" systems in reverse (ie a central system COLLECTING small amounts of data when polled), maybe even accessed through the existing cable TV or internet distribution access system. In any event a 14 trillion dollar market looks just about absurdly optimistic.